What’s on the menu for Mother’s Day 1960 at the Park Lane Hotel

It’s Mother’s Day 1960, and you’re part of a well-to-do family looking to celebrate the holiday at one of the Mother’s Day brunches hosted by hotels and restaurants all over the city.

You choose the Park Lane Hotel, which in 1960 actually was on Park Avenue, opposite the Waldorf-Astoria. (Since 1971, the Park Lane Hotel has been on Central Park South.)

So what’s on the menu? Things start off light, with the requisite offerings of consommé, grapefruit, and melon.

For the entreé course, the eggs benedict look tasty, but the boneless squab chicken casserole less so. And what exactly is “mother’s style” chicken fricassee?

Maybe the simplicity of the cold buffet selections are the way to go, topped off with the mysterious (but probably delicious) “mother’s day” layer cake.

I’m sure the actual Mother’s Day brunch at the Park Lane in 1960 satisfied many families and the moms who were honored.

But the menu reveals something interesting about how restaurant menus have changed in the last 60 years. Rather than a selection of the kind of adventurous offerings contemporary New York City menus typically feature, this one reflects a very midcentury American palate for casseroles, strawberry shortcake, creamed chicken, and V-8.

Did New York restaurants evolve at some point in the last 60 years, or did they typically offer the kinds of unfancy food options people actually prepared and ate in their own homes at the time?

Then again, the price of this meal for each person is a mere $5, per the menu. Even for 1960s prices, that sounds like a decent meal in an upscale setting for a bargain.

[NYPL Digital Collections]

From a merchant’s mansion to a home for friendless women, the many lives of an 1847 brownstone on 14th Street

A rollicking mix of apartment buildings, loft spaces, bars, and discount stores, West 14th Street hasn’t been considered an elite place to build a home for almost two centuries.

But in the New York of the 1840s, what had once been the dividing line between the urban city and the wilds of Manhattan was transforming into a fashionable residential thoroughfare.

Families with money and means began purchasing land on West 14th Street and putting up wide, roomy brownstones from Union Square to Eighth Avenue. One of those new brownstone dwellers was Andrew S. Norwood.

Norwood’s name wouldn’t resonate with contemporary city residents. But in his day, this Knickerbocker New Yorker was considered one of Gotham’s “solid and substantial” citizens, per Valentine’s Manual of Old New York.

Born in 1770 and the son of a Patriot, Norwood became a successful merchant, stockbroker, the owner of a line of packet ships, a founder of the Presbyterian church on Cedar Street, a friend of the Marquis of Lafayette and “the Washington family,” and a resident of a posh home on Bond Street, per Valentine’s Manual.

In 1845, he added real estate developer to the mix and bought several lots on 14th and 15th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, states the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). By 1847, he had built the first three brick or masonry buildings on the north side of the block: numbers 239, 241, and 243 West 14th Street.

All three met the definition of “first class” single-family houses, per the LPC. Norwood chose 241 as his family home, an outstanding example of “a transitional style which combines Greek Revival with Italianate features,” wrote the LPC, noting the full-length French doors on the first floor windows, the cast-iron balconies, and the brownstone trim on the red brick facade.

We can assume Norwood and his family lived well inside their new house, with its 14-foot ceilings, 13 fireplaces, mahogany parlor doors, silver doorknobs, and mantelpiece made of Carrara marble. The generously sized house had room for dinner parties and servants’ quarters, and one can imagine the family hosting prominent West 14th Street neighbors, like the Van Beurens.

At age 86, Norwood passed away in his house in 1856—just as commercial establishments were coming to 14th Street and the residential vibe was giving way to stores and theaters.

The house stayed in the Norwood family until the turn of the century. Norwood’s son, also named Andrew and also a stockbroker (and original member of the New York Stock Exchange), became the owner, per the LPC.

Whether he lived there until his death in 1879 isn’t clear; an 1871 ad in the New York Daily Herald notes an upcoming auction of “elegant household furniture” at 241 West 14th Street.

In any case, the house’s days as a 19th century private residence were over. By the 1880s it served as a boarding house, according to a New York Times mention.

In 1890, the house changed hands again. Now it functioned as the headquarters of the New York Deaconess’ Home and Training School of the Methodist Episcopal Church, an organization that “trained nurse deaconesses who care for the sick poor in their homes,” according to an 1895 New York City charities directory.

King’s Handbook of 1892 added that the charity had “about a score of inmates” who study the bible, medicine, hygiene, and nursing to prepare for being in service to “the poor and the sick…the sick and the dying.”

Five years later, a different type of “inmate” lived in Andrew Norwood’s house, which had now become the “Shelter for Respectable Girls.” Run by a Christian denomination, the shelter put out an urgent plea in the New York Times in 1899 for donations to continue its work “giving shelter and help to respectable girls who are homeless and friendless.”

In 1900, more than 500 girls stayed at the shelter, which catered to young “friendless” women who came to New York for job opportunities yet had no connections, nor a “respectable” place to stay.

In the early 1900s, after the Norwood estate sold the house, a dentist became the occupant. At some point in the 20th century it transformed into a funeral home. Perhaps this is what the vertical sign hanging off the facade states in the fourth photo, above, from 1940.

Andrew Norwood’s home became a private residence once again in 1976, when a real estate broker named Raf Borello bought the property, according to venuereport.com. Borello began a 30-year restoration of this 1840s anachronism.

The restoration involved “uncovering layers of paint, plaster, dirt, and muck to bring the house back to its glory days,” stated venuereport.com. “By the time Borello died in 2005, the property was fully restored, featured a phenomenal garden in the back, and the exterior had been registered to the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission.”

What would come next for this revitalized remnant of pre-Civil War New York City?

It was purchased in 2007 and transformed into the Norwood Club, a members-only club described in venuereport.com by the owner, Alan Linn, as “a modern-day salon for the creative community in New York, a space to congregate, socialize and swap ideas.  It is a ‘home for the curious.'”

The Club seemed to thrive for at least a decade, with more than a thousand members who submitted to an interview before being selected to join. Perhaps the pandemic took its toll, as the Norwood Club closed in 2022.

Since then, Andrew Norwood’s elegant brownstone, so lovely and stylish in its era, has been looking rough around the edges. Debris is scattered on the stoop, and the columns flanking the front doors are flaking and cracking.

Let’s hope a savior appears for this dowager of a brownstone on an unbeautiful block but with such a deep and rich backstory.

[Fourth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; fifth image: New York Times]

What remains of an East Harlem five and dime store that opened almost a century ago

It doesn’t look like much, just another semi-vacant commercial building—this one on the southeast corner of 106th Street and Third Avenue—now occupied by a Duane Reade.

But give it a closer look, and Art Deco decorative touches come in to view, like the patterns in the light bricks and small geometric shapes above the first and second floors. With its enormous windows, this space was meant to be welcoming and accessible.

On the 106th Street side is a slab in the middle of the facade by the roofline. It proudly carries a name: Kress. What was Kress?

Similar to Woolworth’s, S. H. Kress & Co was a five and dime retail chain that at its height had more than 250 stores across the country. Houseware, toys, accessories, candy, goldfish, underwear, notions, paper goods, and all kinds of random thingamajigs could be found in a Kress store.

The chain was founded by Samuel W. Kress in 1896 in Memphis. As stores expanded nationwide, Kress moved his company headquarters to New York City. He also purchased a Fifth Avenue penthouse for his family and his growing art collection.

Several Kress outlets soon opened in Gotham, including one on Fifth Avenue and 39th Street (shuttered in the late 1970s) and another at 256 West 125th Street. Opened in 1920, it was likely the very first New York City Kress store, according to Walter Grutchfield.

The Kress on East 106th Street made its debut five years later, stated Grutchfield, adding that it closed up in 1994. “It seems to have been the last surviving Kress store in New York,” he wrote.

Five and dimes were very popular in their 20th century heyday; they were utilitarian versions of more glamorous department stores that sold a variety of usually more expensive items under one roof.

Imagine this enormous Kress store in its 20th century prime, when the neighborhood was a shopping corridor bustling with middle- and working-class customers. The store would have been partly obscured by the Third Avenue Elevated tracks until the 1950s. (Above, in 1940)

Perhaps it’s fitting that Duane Reade now operates in the former Kress space. The pharmacy chain might be the closest replacement New Yorkers have for five and dimes like Kress and Woolworth—which had a store not too far away on Third Avenue and 121st Street.

[Third photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

The forgotten painter who captured the contrasting landscapes of 1930 New York City

By the Depression year of 1930, New York City was increasingly becoming a city of highs and lows.

[“Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater”]

The highs were evident in Gotham’s skyline. Elegant residential towers lined the borders of Central Park and the city’s posher avenues. The Chrysler Building rose above 42nd Street, and the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center soon followed at different ends of Midtown.

At odds with these gleaming towers were the lows—the many low-rise blocks across Manhattan. Spread out between their new high-rise neighbors and congregated in poorer, more densely packed areas were tenement buildings, factories, and warehouses, some crumbling with age.

[“The Cavalry, Central Park”]

Someone who appears to have noticed this stark contrast in the cityscape was Médard Verburgh. A Belgian painter of sensitive, colorful portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, Verburgh’s work was to be exhibited at the prestigious Newhouse Galleries on East 57th Street in January 1930.

Though Verburgh seems to be an artist forgotten by the contemporary world, he had a presence in the first half of the 20th century. A critic writing in the New York Times described the Newhouse Galleries exhibit as one that “should not be missed by anyone interested in Belgian art—or, for that matter, in art more catholically considered.”

Verburgh, 44 years old at the time, presumably came to the city for the exhibit. He also apparently felt inspired enough by the physical landscape to paint it.

[“On the Rooftops of New York”]

Each of the four works in this post date to 1930, and all capture the city’s contrasts in vibrant colors and rough brushstrokes. The top image, “Sixth Avenue and Ziegfeld Theater,” juxtaposes office towers and smaller commercial and residential holdouts on a busy traffic artery of the then-modern city.

The Ziegfeld Theater, opened in 1929 at the corner of 54th Street, would be the whitish building on the left—though it doesn’t resemble the actual Ziegfeld Theater that occupied this site until it was demolished in 1966.

The second painting, “The Calvary, Central Park,” showcases the enormous apartment towers and office buildings of Central Park South looking like a fortification around the expansive pasture of the park and the equestrians riding inside it.

[“Le Metro Aerien”]

“On the Rooftops of New York,” the third painting, features tenement roof dwellers dancing and making music, a black cat curled up in the corner bearing witness to the sounds and steps. It’s an intimate and personal scene with the impersonal, impenetrable skyline in the background.

The final painting has a French title, “Le Metro Aerien”—or The Aerial Metro in English. Here Verburgh gives us the thickest brushstrokes with images of a brick-red warehouse or factory and an elevated train circling in front of it, and sketches of skyscrapers in the rear.

Exactly what neighborhood the painting is set in isn’t clear, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Verburgh presents another contrast of the old and new New York City—the energy and might of the old in comparison to the fortresslike facelessness of the 1930 skyscraper metropolis.

Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour of Gilded Age Riverside Drive!

Which still-standing mansion built in 1907 has a mysterious basement tunnel leading to the Hudson River? Where is one of the few Beaux-Arts row houses that has its original wood-carved doors? Why is the Drive the only avenue in Manhattan that branches off into small carriage roads?

Which famous American writer came to a rock outcropping in Riverside Park every day to stare across the Hudson River? Who was the rich wife and mother so disturbed by tugboat horns on the riverfront that she formed a committee to suppress “unnecessary” noise?

Join Ephemeral New York on a time-traveling walking tour that answers these questions and delves into the backstory of the city’s most beautiful avenue!

Opened in 1880, Riverside Drive came into its heyday in the Gilded Age—but the tour will explore the long history of this western edge of Manhattan that was once isolated farmland and then one of the city’s mansion-lined millionaire miles.

Tours have sold out so far this spring, but tickets remain for two tours coming up on Sunday, May 5, Sunday May 12, and Sunday, June 2:

Sunday, May 5, 1-3:15 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, May 12, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

Sunday, June 2, 1-3:30 pm: get tickets at this link

The tours are fun, breezy, and filled with secrets and insights. Hope to see everyone there!

The magnificent mantelpiece that greeted guests at the Vanderbilt mansion on 57th Street

Imagine being a first-time guest to one of Alice and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Gilded Age balls or dinner parties, held at their spectacular new mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

As you pass through the front doors of the house, completed in 1883, you’re received in view of this stunning ornate mantelpiece. At the time, it dominated the mansion’s entry hall, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s the kind of objet d’art one would expect from a Vanderbilt mansion. Sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had been hired by artist John La Farge, the mantelpiece features “two classical caryatids, Amor (Love) and Pax (Peace), [which] support the expansive entablature with bowed heads and upraised arms,” noted the Met.

Elaborate carvings and floral motifs decorate the mantelpiece. Above it is a mosaic with Latin words across a woman’s head. Cornelius Vanderbilt himself chose the phrase, which translates into “the house at its threshold gives evidence of the master’s good will. Welcome to the guest who arrives; farewell and helpfulness to him who departs,” according to Wayne Craven, author of Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society.

The mantelpiece was commissioned by the Vanderbilts—and it outlasted them and their house as well. An 1890s renovation doubled the size of the mansion, and the mantelpiece with the caryatids was relegated to a family sitting room on the second floor, states Craven.

Not long after the expansion, Cornelius Vanderbilt (grandson of the Commodore) suffered a stroke, passing away in 1899. Alice stayed in the house with an army of servants, struggling to pay for the upkeep even with a multimillion dollar inheritance.

In the 1920s she moved out and put the house up for sale (below in 1907), correctly anticipating that the land it sat on was more valuable than the house, which would be torn down. In the house’s final weeks she managed to salvage some items from the interiors.

She donated a sculpture group to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel going up across Fifth Avenue. And to the Met she gave this mantelpiece, a lovely remnant of Gilded Age art and architecture and the kind of wealthy family palace New York will never see again.

[Third and fourth images: Wikipedia]

The mystery of the gilded glass booth outside Midtown’s St. Regis Hotel

It’s an eye-catching piece of street furniture: a booth made of glass, brass, and copper, with a door like a Romanesque arch and a capsule-shaped side compartments.

This unusual sidewalk booth can be found under the awning at the East 55th Street entrance of the St. Regis Hotel.

Built on Fifth Avenue in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV (the only son of the infamous Mrs. Astor), the Beaux-Arts St. Regis has long been one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, heralded as “the new shrine of the millionaire” shortly after it opened by the New York Times. (Below in 1907)

The purpose of this glass and metal booth seems clear—it’s an enclosed space for a doorman to wait for guests, something all hotels and attended apartment houses had and still have.

Architectural critics writing just after the hotel opened gave it the fancy name of “sentry box” rather than a doorman’s station—a hint that maybe it was more for security rather than assisting guests with heavy luggage.

But whatever it’s called, the design and shape intrigue me. A hotel as sumptuous and technologically advanced as the St. Regis—guests were pampered with air-cooled rooms and a private telephone in each suite—would definitely not build an ordinary-looking doorman booth. But what is it, exactly?

According to a doorman I spoke to (who said it’s been in front of the entrance since the hotel’s early days), it’s probably a Gilded Age–era elevator, or an exact replica of an elevator passengers would find circa 1904. This explanation is based on years of elevator-savvy passersby pointing out what it is and explaining the different parts, delighted to talk about their trade.

It does have kind of a Willa Wonka and the Great Glass Elevator vibe. Still, the question remains as to why the hotel placed a fancy elevator outside the entrance.

Was it to let potential guests know that the hotel was equipped with the latest in elevator mechanics? A clever way to repurpose one that broke down and couldn’t be used? It’s too heavy to be moved, the doorman told me, so it remains in place.

The St. Regis has another relic of a previous New York City, and I don’t mean the 1935 Maxfield Parrish mural at the King Cole Bar.

Look up above the 55th Street awning and you’ll see a copper sign that says “St. Regis Cab Call.” (Above photo shows the original sentry box and part of the cab call.)

Old-time taxi signs can still be spotted on apartment buildings and hotels, but I’ve never seen this kind of sign before—which I think let cab drivers in a pre-Uber era know how many people at the hotel were waiting for a ride.

[Second image: MCNY, X2011.34.287; fifth photo: via Andrew Alpern]

Three New York City subway stops, three different design styles

How many ways are there to style a subway entrance sign? In New York City, dozens of designs and typefaces are used across the subway system—often with no rhyme or reason.

Take this gold and white sign on William Street. It’s for a side entrance/exit for the Fulton Street station, affixed to a 20th century office building called the Royal Building.

Its long tapered shape, the white block (a light?) at the top—I’ve never seen anything like it.

More than a few stops in Midtown style their subway signage with Art Deco lettering, like this subway sign on East 42nd Street. The design is sleek and modern, just like so many of the office towers on this crosstown thoroughfare.

The M above it is an unfortunate remnant from the late 1960s, when the MTA had the idea to unify all the different subway lines and rebrand them. The effort didn’t stick, but some of these Ms remain.

This last subway sign image comes from the East 23rd Street 6 train entrance, I believe. The typeface and tile feels classical, and the V instead of a U is a nice Roman touch.

Why this design for this stop? I don’t know—but I do know that all the variety of styles in the subway make traveling underground a little more interesting.

A cluster of delightful West Side row houses that look like one enormous mansion

Look up at the massive brick and mortar confection at the southeastern corner of West End Avenue and 102nd Street, and you might think you’re facing one wildly idiosyncratic Gilded Age mansion.

There’s the center tower with four stories of bay windows capped by a bell-shaped roof. On the West End Avenue side are chimneys, carved panels, stained glass, and windows of all styles. On the 102nd Street end, balconies, pedimented parapets and a stoop entrance animate this sleepy side street.

Because all these ornamental eccentricities are united in brownstone and fronted by a lacy iron fence, it seems like one house—specifically a surviving example of one of the mansions built in the late 19th century in the rapidly urbanizing West End of Manhattan (the Upper West Side of today).

But a closer look tells a different story. Rather than one mansion, this corner features four separate townhouses completed in 1893. As a group, it’s the “sole surviving example of a type of site planning used on several corner plots on West End Avenue in the early 1890s,” stated the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 1990.

Number 858 is in the center, and numbers 854 and 856 face West End Avenue. Number 254 West 102nd Street is around the corner, unattached to its three sisters except by a thin band of brownstone above a path leading to the shared backyard (below left).

These clusters of fanciful row houses were a popular house style on the Upper West Side of the late 1800s, as the LPC pointed out. The style worked for builders, who wanted to maximize profits on the corner lots they purchased by putting up as many separate houses as possible.

Meanwhile, discerning middle- and upper middle class buyers were turning up their noses at the traditional brownstone row houses built in the 1860s and 1870s. Instead, they desired dwellings that rebelled against what was then considered boring, woefully out of date uniformity.

They also sought lots of light, an amenity traditional row houses didn’t offer. That might be why the architects decided to build one of the houses unattached—it afforded the opportunity for more back and side windows, plus a yard in the middle and Hudson River views from the top floors.

“Highly animated by recessed entrances and balconies, these lively Queen Anne/Romanesque Revival–style houses typify the eclectic residential architecture of West End Avenue in the 1890s,” wrote Barbara Diamonstein-Spielvogel in her book, The Landmarks of New York. (Below, two of the houses in 1910).

“By detailing each building individually, the architects also expressed a reaction against the uniform look of the city’s older Italianate row houses.”

Like so many other houses on West End Avenue, which like Riverside Drive was designated as a commerce-free residential thoroughfare, this group of houses was built on speculation.

The interiors featured several bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens with butler’s pantries, and front parlors with music rooms. “All the principal living and sleeping rooms have mantels, mirrors, and open fireplaces, with tiled hearths and onyx or marble facings,” wrote the Real Estate Record and Guide in an approving nod published in February 1893. (Below, in 1940)

Such an attractive cluster of row houses should have had no problem finding buyers. But with the city and nation in the grip of the Panic of 1893, the developers found themselves with few takers.

Number 856 was sold first, noted the LPC. Two years later, the remaining houses were sold to the investors, and architect/developers Ernest Schneider and Henry Herter took title to Number 858. That house sold in 1897, then the title reverted to Schneider and Herter in 1898. (Below, the row houses in 1893)

The others sold in the mid-1890s but seemed to change hands often. Number 254 West 102nd Street became a boarding house.

These days, the cluster of Gilded Age row houses are charming anachronisms on a West End Avenue long dominated by rows of prewar apartment houses. Each of the four, now all rental buildings, seems to be in decent shape. A few front entrances have been altered; some ornamentation has disappeared.

But as a surviving example of a type of housing once found on many corners of the Upper West Side, this group continues to delight passersby with its whimsical style and beguiling backstory.

[Fifth photo: NYPL Digital Collection; sixth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services; seventh photo: Real Estate Record & Guide]

What a breathtaking aerial view of Riverside Drive says about Manhattan in 1910

Riverside Drive was just 30 years old when this stunning birds-eye panorama of the Drive between about 110th and 123rd Street was taken, according to the Kermit Project, which posted the photo (via Shorpy.com) and some information about it.

Though it’s more than a century old, click into the photo to magnify the view—you’ll see that the landmarks of the Riverside Drive of today are already in place.

The dome and columns of Grant’s Tomb stand to the north, some elegant prewar apartment towers loom over low-rise dwelling houses (almost all of which will disappear in the ensuing decades), and the carriage road and traffic road are separated by a wide swath of Riverside Park.

But the enlarged view of the photo reveals some vestiges of the Riverside Drive of old. On the lower left are people riding horses—a reminder that Riverside Park once had a popular bridle path.

See that pier sticking out into the Hudson? It belonged to Columbia University. A larger pier juts out at 125th Street that served ferries going back and forth to New Jersey, according to the Kermit Project. No George Washington Bridge quite yet!

Is that an early form of scaffolding on the lower right side of the image? It blocks the front of a bow-fronted row house, which resembles 292 Riverside Drive, a C.P.H. Gilbert–designed house that still stands on Riverside between 101st and 102nd Street—putting this view south of 110th Street.

The theater ads on the lower left are a lot of fun, and a reminder that popular entertainment a century ago was no smarter than what we stream today.

Want to learn more about the history of Riverside Drive, especially the Drive in the Gilded Age—when this avenue rivaled Fifth Avenue as the city’s millionaire row? Join Ephemeral New York on an upcoming walking tour! Tour dates are as follows:

Sunday, April 14: A few tickets remain for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Sunday, May 5: Sign up for Exploring the Mansions and Memorials of Riverside Drive, organized through the New York Adventure Club.

Sunday, May 12: Sign up for The Gilded Age Mansions and Monuments of Riverside Drive, organized by Bowery Boys Walks.

Hope to see everyone on these fun, insightful walks up one of New York’s most beautiful avenues!

[Photo via Shorpy]